How to achieve the most flexibility and scalability for your IT infrastructure

For years now, enterprises and service providers alike have been leasing data center space from wholesale providers to meet their large-scale IT infrastructure requirements. While this model has worked for organizations with the financial and personnel resources to build out space themselves, the growing demand in the industry is for more flexibility to ramp up space and power on an as-needed basis.
To address this recent demand, providers are starting to offer larger colocation areas — something referred to as a Data Center-as-a-Service approach.Smart Business learned more from Pete Stevenson, CEO at Latisys, about the difference between Data Center-as-a-Service and the more traditional wholesale leasing models.

What is Data Center-as-a-Service?

Data Center-as-a-Service is an offering that mirrors the features of colocation — providing access to power, cooling and bandwidth within a secure space inside a 24/7 staffed, fully redundant and highly reliable facility — but is designed for customers seeking 250 kilowatts to 2 megawatts of IT load. This size of deployment is typically ideal for the wholesale leasing arrangement, where tenants within what the wholesale providers consider a ‘turnkey’ facility are still responsible for facilitating their own routing infrastructure, racks, cabling, IP connectivity, etc. Data Center-as-a-Service providers deliver all of this under a service contract, leveraging their investments in equipment, technical experts and premier providers to eliminate the need for any customers’ capital expenditures.

Why would an organization choose a Data Center-as-a-Service solution over a traditional leasing model?

The Data Center-as-a-Service model provides the customer with much more flexibility than traditional leasing models. Most leasing arrangements are long-term agreements, ranging from 7- to 10-year-long contracts. As more and more companies are learning about the advantages of server virtualization and cloud computing environments, locking up a significant investment in a lease over several years can prove to be very limiting with regard to taking full advantage of rapidly advancing technologies that offer improved efficiency and reliability.
Providers of the Data Center-as-a-Service business model are often in a better position to offer more reasonable leasing terms, as well as additional IT infrastructure management solutions. From managed hosting to managed services, including storage, backup, security services, monitoring, load balancing and disaster recovery services, the provider’s ability to align different services and solutions according to the customers’ requirements translates into maximum agility for the customer. They are able to take full advantage of the latest infrastructure technologies.

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